by Edward Lee
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, give me—”
“Another chance?” A laugh blurted from her lips. “I’ve been doing that for a year, and I’m sick of it! I’m making a fool of myself thinking that we can ever have a normal relationship. My time would be better spent ramming my head into a brick wall. At least the goddamn brick wall would be more receptive to my needs than you.”
Am I paranoid, or is this not going very well? Garrett posed to himself. One thing he did know, however: he loved her. She was so beautiful, and…she washed dishes. He stood bewildered, scratching his butt, a cigarette dangling from his lips.
“Because I’ve finally seen the light,” she added, mockingly slapping her forehead. “After all this time, I’ve finally been able to see the truth behind this farce of a relationship.” Her gorgeous green eyes blazed, angry pinpoints of green fire. “You know what you’re going to be doing five years from now, ten? Huh, Harlan?”
“Uh…”
“The same damn thing you’re doing right now! Standing in this rat-hole apartment with your hands in your shorts scratching your ass!”
At last, shoes on feet and purse in hand, Jessica turned in a pissed-off blur, stormed out of the apartment, and slammed the door behind her so hard, Garrett’s framed autographed photo of renowned ufologist Kevin D. Randall popped off its nail in the foyer and shattered.
Garrett stared after her boisterous exit, open-mouthed.
“Ain’t love grand?” he said aloud.
Eventually, in his shock, he turned around, caught a glimpse of his boxer-short-clad self in the wall mirror, scratching his butt. Great. He quickly pulled his hands out from the back of his shorts, then distractedly wandered to the window and looked out.
“Harlan E. Garrett, take heart,” he told himself. “Today’s been a bad day, that’s true. You lost your job and you lost your beautiful girlfriend—”
Sunlight blared in the window. Not a cloud in the sky.
“—but things could be a lot worse, couldn’t they?” Garrett nodded a philosophically positivistic agreement to himself. He shrugged limply.
“It could be raining, right?”
««—»»
Torrential rain poured down on the car’s windshield, the wipers thunking rapidly back and forth. The sudden rainstorm had been a bit of a surprise, the turning black in moments and cracking open like an egg. Thunder rumbled. Lightning whiplashed blue-white tendrils in the murky darkness overhead.
But the driver of the rental car was unperturbed. His entire life had been a storm. He liked storms.
Through the deluge, the green road-sign with white letters appeared in the bright halogen headlights:
WELCOME TO WASHINGTON D.C. under which someone has crudely spray-painted in scarlet REDSKINS SUCK!
The driver’s black-gloved hands gripped the wheel a bit more tightly. The leather creaked. He didn’t know the Washington Redskins from a redskin peanut, and didn’t care; football seemed a silly sport of misguided, structured violence. When legs were irreparably shattered with multiple fractures or when men broke their necks and were left quadriplegic, the spectators didn’t care. They just kept watching. They wanted more, and figured permanently disabling injuries were part of the risk when these athletes signed their seven-figure contracts.
But the driver had much better ways of disabling people, much more expeditious ways. Professional sports merely seemed to license half-measures. The gladiators of Rome didn’t, and neither did he. There was no gray area in the philosophy of violence.
Idiots…
The sudden clench of his hands on the steering wheel was merely a reflex of something that could be likened to excitement.
He’d just entered the official limits of Washington, D.C.…
He was getting close.
Good.
Once Maryland Route 50 turned into the District’s well-known New York Avenue, a trash-strewn, pot-holed mainline through the nation’s capital, the driver’s eyes quickly scanned the coming road for a pay phone. Insular cell-phone devices or even satellite phones would not suffice for this: too risky. Instead, he looked for a simple landline.
The ludicrous lighted sign bloomed: SCOT. A gas station. Hadn’t that franchise gone under decades ago, right along with BP and Sinclair? Evidently not. Probably a tag-along station privately owned, the driver guessed but hardly cared. He pulled in at once, stopped the rental right in front of the phone booth. The rain splattered on him, stepping from the car to the booth, then he clacked the hinged doors closed.
Outside, the storm continued to rage.
His gloved hands deftly opened the black lunch-box-sized case he’d brought with him: an N.P.O 1309 telephone descrambler. He removed the pay phone’s receiver and snapped it into the unit’s reception cups, then picked up the unit’s own receiver. In the reflection of the phone booth’s glass, his face looked phantom-black.
He dropped thirty-five cents into the slot and dialed “O.”
“Thank you for using Bell-Atlantic,” a cheery voice answered. “How may I assist you?”
GO GONZAGA EAGLES, he read a brief announcement scratched into the phone’s chrome coin-box plate. And: IF CLINTON DIDN’T INHALE, DID MONICA SWALLOW? “I’d like to place a station-to-station call, please,” he said. “Area code 202-266-0001, extension suffix 6.”
“One moment please.”
The driver’s eyes flicked up at a sudden thumping on the phone booth glass. In an instant the door was loudly pushed wide open.
Standing in the phone booth’s rainy entrance was scrawny shaven-headed punk in a sleeveless black-leather jacket and enough facial piercings to fill a tackle box. Twenty-five, thirty-five—it was hard to tell these days; the crack and the ice and the black tar Mexican “boy” wrung them out young these days, added a decade for every year. The kid’s swollen red eyes looked puffed and teary in whatever addiction it was that he’d sold his soul too.
“Nice suit, fuck,” the boy said. “I’ll take the jacket and the wallet. Now.” Then he raised a sharpened screwdriver.
“Think so?”
“Be cool, man, don’t be stupid. Hand over the wallet. If there ain’t some good cash in it, you’re fucked. Don’t make me kill you.”
“What’s a bag of boy cost over here in the east?” the driver strangely asked. “Ten bucks, twenty? On the west coast, they sell the shit by the quarter-gram, but they’re all loaded shots. Tips you losers over in a day. For God’s sake, what the hell is wrong with you, kid? Life is a gift. Look what you’re doing with it.”
The addict stared, taken aback even in his twitching withdrawal. “You crazy, pops? I’ll gut you right here. Gimme the cash…and the jacket. And I’ll take the car keys, too.” Next, he raised the screwdriver higher.
“What are you gonna do with that? Hang a towel rack? Get a life, son.”
The addict was incredulous.
“I’m making an important call,” the driver said. “I got no time to play paddy cakes with junkies, so I’ll tell you this once: Walk away.”
The addict grinned. “Fuck it.” Then he lunged.
The driver’s left hand shot out, grasped the addict’s throat while his right hand kept the phone calmly to his ear. A few futile jabs of the sharpened screwdriver buffeted against the suit jacket, not even scratching the Threat-Level III Kevlar vest beneath. The addict’s face ballooned as the driver’s left hand squeezed harder. In a moment the screwdriver clattered to the floor, and a moment after that his trachea splintered.
“Rogers and Sons Dry Cleaning,” came a stiff male voice over the phone.
The driver clicked a button on the receiver with his thumb and then came brittle fizzing sound over the line, then a long beep.
“Tango-six-dash-four-nine,” the male voice said. “Counter-measures confirmed. Feed-decay-refeed loop—positive for C.E.I.C ancillary band.”
The driver released his sudden burden; the addict fell to the floor with a meager thunk, twitching, gargling blood.
“Order retrieval request, ID eight,” the driver said into the phone.
“Crypt double?”
“Q-J.”
“Crypt triple?”
“W-Y-N.”
“Roger, QJ/WYN. Listen and out.” A pause lingered over the scrambled/ descrambled transmission. “Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.”
The driver, QJ/WYN, replaced the unit’s receiver into its case and hung up the pay phone.
At his Gucci wing-tipped feet, the dying drug addict still twitched, still gargled foamy blood.
The tracheal wound would more than likely kill him, but more than likely wasn’t good enough. QJ/WYN removed a Mont Blanc pen from his jacket pocket, pressed the clip, and out shot a four-inch-long barbed titanium needle. He inserted it into one side of the addict’s neck, dragged it back and forth a few times until the carotid was sufficiently torn.
Within a minute, QJ/WYN was back in the rental, back in the rainstorm, driving toward the city which lay ahead.
CHAPTER TWO
Silence.
Blackness. Then—
The little boy’s name is Danny, and Danny is walking up a long hill from a distance. Dull red and yellow lights seem to be throbbing from the other side of the hill. Is that what Danny is walking toward? The lights?
Yes.
The night-time has no sound at first, no crickets, no peepers, none of the sounds he’s used to on summer nights. As his pace up the hill breaks into a trot, his footfalls make no sound. There’s a funny smell drifting around him, like burning metal, like last summer when they’d had that big storm and lightning had hit the neighbor’s TV dish.
Now, the red and yellow blobs of light appear to be leaking smoke, or steam, and their patterns change, almost as if the lights have somehow been able to sense Danny’s approach.
Once he’s made it to the top of the hill, he just stands there, staring.
Staring down at—
Danny doesn’t know what it is.
Trapezoid, he thinks. He knows the word from math class, when the teacher was talking about geometry. Basic shapes and angles. It’s stuff he’ll learn more about when he’s older and gets into higher grades. Circles, squares, triangles. Parallelograms.
Trapezoids.
The trapezoid is made of blinding white light that seems to be sitting on top of the other red and yellow lights. And now Danny can hear a sound: the sound of his own rapid, terrified breathing.
All the colors churn over his face. He can feel each separate color—the white, the yellow, and the red—as though each is a hand rubbing over him.
Suddenly, then, something moves. It’s inside the trapezoid.
A shape, a thin figure.
Looking back at him—
—and—
—everything turns black—
—and—
“No! No! No!”
—and then Danny woke up.
He jerked bolt upright in bed.
“No,” he whispered to himself.
His rapid breathing continued, the same breathing he’d heard in the nightmare. His heart felt like a little fist trying to beat its way out of his chest.
The nightmare again, he realized. The nightmare…
Only now did his heart pace down; he glanced around and saw with relief that he was not on the weird hill at all, and there were no funny lights and no trapezoid. Instead he lay in the safety of his own bedroom.
It took a few more moments for the shock to run out of his eyes.
“The trapezoid,” he whispered to himself.
He sat up in bed, catching his breath. His pajamas were damp with sweat. He looked at the clock on his nightstand, right beside his Hercules and Xena figures. The clock read: 6:00 A.M.
He remembered the funny smell from the dream, the smell like burning metal, which somehow seemed to linger even though the dream was over. But then the smell was replaced by something much more familiar—the aroma of bacon frying.
“Danny!” his mother called to him from downstairs. “Time to get up! Breakfast is ready!”
««—»»
Garrett frowned in the bookstore window, and the sign that read: “Meet Best-selling Author Arron Matthews, and Buy His New Autographed Book, THE ALIEN ANTENNA NETWORK OF THE GREAT PYRAMIDS!”
Blow me, Garrett thought. It should be me on a damn book tour, not this idiot.
What Garrett hated most were the theory-predators: the phony “autopsies” sanctioned by prime-time tv, the bullshit tabloid and even Penthouse magazine “extraterrestrial” photos, the Joe Scully UFO book that was underwritten by the Air Force as disinformation, etc., etc. More than half of Garrett’s battle wasn’t with the government cells that strove to rape his constitutional rights and discredit him to preposterous degrees, it was the simple assemblage of cash-grubbers out there—like this nimrod Matthews—who would go to the most creative lengths to profit from the work of Garrett and his vilified coterie with everything from snapshots of “faeries” to toy submarines masquerading as the monster of Loch Ness to British bumpkins with nothing better to with their time than elaborately manufacture “crop circle” landing sites.
And with just the right camera angle, an altered gorilla suit made for a great Bigfoot.
The field Garrett had given up so much potential for to put all of his belief into was truly a three-ring circus of fakes, schmucks, scumbags, and greed-laden boneheads. It only made Garrett’s true calling that much more difficult, because for every scintilla of truth he legitimately exposed, there was an avalanche of fraud he had to sift through first like straining lumps of feces from a box of cat litter with his bare hands.
Even when he persevered to meet his most honest objectives, he still wound up smelling like shit.
The tentacles of sham stretched far, yet those same tentacles happily encircled Garrett’s neck on a daily basis. He had no choice but to simply live with it—just as a ditch-digger lived with calluses and a street prostitute lived with subjugation—because it was part of Garrett’s turf, and nobody was putting a gun to his head to walk on it. He walked it because he chose to, because he chose to pursue the truth behind the Big Lie. The shammers were just mosquitoes on a hot, humid day. Garrett didn’t like them, but he swatted them off just the same.
Garrett’s mother had died when he was ten—spinal meningitis. It took Garrett five years to get over it…and then, when he was fifteen, his father had died—heart attack tumor. Just like that, that fast. Good quality middle-class life in Wheaton, Maryland, good schools, good upbringing, never wanted for anything—then poof! It was all gone.
And it had all happened so fast, the young Garrett didn’t know which end of the world was up. His father’s only brother had taken him in for the high school years, and Garrett’s constant honor-roll status had gotten him a scholarship. Four more years of close to a 4.0 average had set Garrett up right—or should have. He’d done everything right, in spite of losing his parents. Since his parents had died, he’d always felt a deepening hole in his heart, but then he looked around and saw the schizos on the street picking cigarette butts out of gutter cracks, all the people in motorized wheelchairs who drooled uncontrollably and couldn’t even hold their heads up straight, and the typical “bums” who sat in alleys like piles of human rot.
All Garret had to do was look at those poor, destitute people to realize that his life, in spite of its traumas, was too bad at all. Sure, his mother and died and his father had died, but some force of fate or God or luck had kept him whole and sane and walking. Garrett felt like the luckiest guy on earth when he saw what life had bestowed upon certain others. Earthquakes wiped out tens of thousands in a single minute. Genocidal wars claimed millions in months. Weighed against all of those brutal truths, Garrett knew that he’d been dealt some damn good cards.
In college, he’d hung in there and made it. Hard work, focus, studying when everyone else was slamming beers at the Student Union (Garrett had only slammed them on weekends). H
is major in computer engineering opened an influx of doors. But then Garrett had done the least logical thing.
He’d enlisted.
He’d joined the Air Force.
He needed more experience. He needed more life. For him, the standard pattern of high school, college, and solid mainstream job didn’t make it. There’d always been something missing. He didn’t know what but he just knew.
And that’s when he’d started hacking into encrypted databases…
That’s what had put the match to the fuse of his current plight, and made him what he was today…
It was just that some days were better than others.
He left his sour grapes at the bookstore window, and now, in jeans, and a crumpled black t-shirt that read SYSTEMS BRANCH: USAF, paused on Connecticut Avenue to light a cigarette, frowning at its stale taste. With the feds raising tobacco taxes every other month, Garrett was forced to buy generics made with tobacco from Indonesia. Twenty-five bucks a carton for this crap, he sputtered to himself. Pretty soon I won’t even able to afford to light a match. But at least he knew his taxes were going to a good cause: J-STAR targeting satellites and the B-3 Bomber.
The downtown lunch-hour rush packed the sidewalks and streets. Well-dressed men and women hustled through the crowds for their power lunches. Car horns from slogged traffic brayed like irate mechanical beasts. At the corner Garrett passed an x-rated movie house and at the same time could see the Lincoln Memorial in the distance. Skin flicks and politics all wrapped up in the same charming city. He wondered if Abe was ever tempted to get off his chair and check out the video selection.
After two more blocks, Garrett ducked into his favorite watering hole, Benny’s Rebel Room. It used to be a strip joint until the city counsel had revoked all their licenses for a new business district. Stepping off the hot, humid street into the tavern’s cool darkness felt like walking into a nicer world.
“Harlan,” greeted Craig, the Rebel Room’s co-owner and main barkeep. “Damn, I knew I should’ve locked the door.”
